“That little black-headed fellow doing the stalking
act upon that python was great”

“Shooting straight upwards on the top of what
appeared to have been a submarine mine in a mild form”

“He clutched, and tore, and gulped, and gorged”

“All allowed that he was the pluckiest beast
on earth”

THE WAY OF THE WILD

I

GULO THE INDOMITABLE

If his father had been a brown bear and his mother
a badger, the result in outward appearance would have
been Gulo, or something very much like him.
But not all the crossing in the world could have accounted
for his character; that came straight from the Devil,
his master. Gulo, however, was not a cross.
He was himself, Gulo, the wolverine, alias
glutton, alias carcajou, alias quick-hatch,
alias fjeldfras in the vernacular, or, officially,
Gulo luscus. But, by whatever name you
called him, he did not smell sweet; and his character,
too, was of a bad odor. A great man once said
that he was like a bear cub with a superadded tail;
but that great man cannot have seen his face.
If he had, he would have looked for his double among
the fiends on the top of Notre Dame. There was,
in fact, nothing like him on this earth, only in a
very hot place not on the earth.

He was, in short, a beast with brains that only man,
and no beast, ought to be trusted with; and he had
no soul. God alone knows if love, which softens
most creatures, had ever come to Gulo; his behavior
seemed to show that it had not. Perhaps love
was afraid of him. And, upon my soul, I don’t
wonder.

It was not, however, a hot, but a very cold, place
in the pine-forest where Gulo stood, and the unpitying
moon cast a dainty tracery through the tasseled roof
upon the new and glistening snow around him—­the
snow that comes early to those parts—­and
the north-east wind cut like several razors.
But Gulo did not seem to care. Wrapped up in
his ragged, long, untidy, uncleanly-looking, brown-black
cloak—­just his gray-sided, black fiend’s
face poking out—­he seemed warm enough.
When he lifted one paw to scratch, one saw that the
murderous, scraping, long claws of him were nearly
white; and as he set his lips in a devilish grin,
his fangs glistened white in the moonlight, too.